Over at the New York Times, Harold Mcgee writes that the secret to ribs is already in the kitchen: the oven. Peep, don’t sleep. And here are some more ideas for the grill…

[Photo Credit: A Yankee in a Southern Kitchen]

There is an exhaustive, though ultimately not especially rewarding profile of Mariano Rivera by James Traub in the New York Times Magazine. Perhaps we’re the wrong audience for this story. Closer to the point, I don’t think Mariano is an interesting subject for a magazine piece. He’s dull, in fact, too guarded to reveal anything about his personal life.  How does a savant articulate his gift? Shrugs his shoulders and says he’s doing the Lord’s work.

Writers are left to wax poetic over Mo’s on-the-field accomplishments, his style, his calm, his greatness, his influence around the clubhouse. A writer can talk to players around the league, add some quotes about just how good Mariano is, but otherwise, what is there to say?

So this story is thorough but it doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know about Rivera, and some of Traub’s characterizations are off-base: Kevin Youkilis is a described as a “batting genius” while Jonathan Paplebon is called “the closer who has become Rivera’s great rival.” Youkilis is a great hitter, but a genius? And if Rivera and Paplebon have a rivalry that’s news to me (they just happen to play for rival  teams).

It’s worth checking out, and I rarely tire of reading about Mo, but considering the author and the publication, I was disappointed.

However, the Times does have a cool video piece on Mo that is well-worth looking at.

[Photo Credit: National Geographic]

Here’s Pat Jordan at his best. A first-person essay on his relationship with his brother:

My brother doesn’t know where I live. He doesn’t know who my friends are. He doesn’t know I have two new puppies. He doesn’t know I am talking again to my daughter after 20 years. He doesn’t know if Susan is still well and free from cancer. He doesn’t know if I am well or sick, working or not, vigorous or an old man. I know nothing about him either. I have not talked to him in three years. I have not seen him in five. I have seen him only three times in the last 12 years, at my house in Florida in 2000, at our mother’s funeral in 2002, and at my father’s funeral in 2005. He doesn’t know what I look like now, at 69, whether I have gained or lost weight, whether I have lost my hair like Dad, or still have it like him. But I know what he looks like because he has never aged. He looked old when he was young, but when he got old he looked the same. He’s 83 now. With short hair like Brillo, a long horsey face, and small eyes (his friends called him “Moose”). A tall, sturdily built man with a vise-like handshake that made me wince, his reminder that he would always be stronger than me, like a solid oak unbending in the wind, while I would always be a sapling whipped by the wind until uprooted.

At my mother’s funeral in 2002, my father, my brother, and I greeted mourners in the back of the church in our hometown of Fairfield, Conn. My brother, 6’4″, wore his Ivy League suit from J. Press Clothiers in New Haven, and his wing-tipped cordovan shoes, as sturdy as Dutch clogs. My father, 5’6″, at 92, wore his navy blazer with brass buttons and his regimentally striped tie. I, 6’1″, wore my black leather sport jacket, jeans, and work boots. I had long gray hair and a white beard. My father looked at me and said, “You look like a bum.” My brother said, “Leave the kid alone, Dad. He came all this way.” My brother always defended me to my father. That’s why he always called me “the kid.” It was a sign of affection. To him, I would always be “the kid”; it was his way of excusing my behavior among adults. And whether my brother realized it or not, it was a way to diminish me. Which was the problem, one of them anyway, which is also why, at 69, I have reconciled myself to the possibility that I will never see my brother again.

Karma bites, don’t she?

Deadspin’s got the clip.

Hugo Pratt

Tango…

What makes the Hottentot so hot? …Courage, y’all, courage…

As Bugs Bunny would say…”Gasp.”

According to a piece at Bloomberg.com, Strikeouts Show Pitchers Outdo Hitters Like No Time Since 1968. The first line of the story, written by Mason Levinson, goes, “The end of Major League Baseball’s performance-enhancing drugs era is causing 1960s flashbacks.”  

I haven’t read too much on this subject but casually, I’ve heard this line of thinking before–the spike in pitching has something to do with the “end” of the PED era. My question is:  Weren’t pitchers taking PEDs as well?

Whadda ya think?

[Photo Credit: SI]

Yes, please.

Banana Pudding Ice Cream recipe from Homesick Texan, the most inviting sounding website I’ve heard in a New York minute…

Times two…

Over at the NY Post, Brian Costello writes about Phil Hughes’ innings limits:

“We are being smart about this guy,” Yankees manager Joe Girardi said. “We want him to be in our rotation for a long time. We believe he is a top-end starter and it’s our job to make sure we don’t overuse him.”

Hughes goes against Cliff Lee tonight at the Stadium. That should be a treat.

[Photo Credit: NY Daily News]

A few weeks ago I got together with Bags, whose photographs have graced this space for more than a month now.

Bags takes pictures the old fashioned way. He uses film. Taking photographs is an excuse for him to tool around the city and look, really look at what’s around him (Bags isn’t from New York and I wonder if it takes an outsider’s sensibility to really appreciate the wonders, small and large, that our town has to offer.)

I haven’t used film in years and what I like about it is that it forces you to be selective. You can’t just snap away like you can with a digital camera, not caring how many shots you take. You have to look, carefully, before you decide to press “click.” Also, you may just miss a shot–you get the composition right, but then the classic old guy walks through the frame too quickly and you’ve lost the moment you want to capture. The possibility of this loss, makes it all the more exciting when you do get what you’re looking for.

And then there is the suspense of waiting for your pictures to come back from the lab. Oh, the agony. My feeling is that if you can get one good, I mean really good shot out of a role of 36 you should be pleased.

Anyhow, Bags and I tooled around the Upper West Side–a neighborhood he doesn’t know from–and snapped away. I haven’t gone to the lab yet, but this weekend I’m going to take more shots and then see what I’ve got. In the meantime, I’ve found myself, even without a camera in my napsack, stopping and looking. And for that alone, I am grateful.

The Yanks have the night off, but MLB’s new shining star, Stephen Strasburg is on the hill tonight and the game will be televised on ESPN2.

Here’s an open thread for whatever you find clever…

[Photo Credit: Darrellh200]

Sticking with comic book artists again this week, let’s go spanning the globe.

First, up, the legendary Herge:

Since it is hotter n July today, why not check out a scene from this classic NYC summer flick:

I remember seeing this on opening day near Times Square (my friends and I were the only white kids is the audience). I’ll never forget how we were introduced to Rosie Perez, shadow-boxing of sorts over P.E. Man, the movie, and that theater were charged–hyped, as they used to say.

I don’t think Do the Right Thing is a great movie, but it’s as close as Spike has gotten and I think it is his best, even though it is deeply flawed. It is funny as hell, Ernest Dickerson’s photography is weird and evocative, and Spike really captured a moment in time. When this movie dropped, he was hottest thing in town.

Is Ted Berg the new Ted Baxter?

And is Johnny Damon a rootin’, tootin’, pop-gun shootin’ chickenhawk?

On Saturday morning, our downstairs neighbor rang the doorbell. She just finished her sophomore year of high school. Her mother died of ALS this spring. She’s off with her father to travel around the country this summer. When they return they’ll  move to another, more affordable apartment. She brought us a bag filled with booze as a gift because “my dad doesn’t drink anymore.”

We don’t either but still we accepted the liquor and wished her a happy summer. You’d never tell by talking with her that her mother just died. We’ll miss them not being in the building but told her to stop by anytime.

So I had ALS on my mind and I wanted to share with you the story of Tom Judt. He is an accomplished historian who has ALS and has been writing wonderful, short essays for The New York Review of Books. Here is his latest, on words:

In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell castigated contemporaries for using language to mystify rather than inform. His critique was directed at bad faith: people wrote poorly because they were trying to say something unclear or else deliberately prevaricating. Our problem, it seems to me, is different. Shoddy prose today bespeaks intellectual insecurity: we speak and write badly because we don’t feel confident in what we think and are reluctant to assert it unambiguously (“It’s only my opinion…”). Rather than suffering from the onset of “newspeak,” we risk the rise of “nospeak.”

I am more conscious of these considerations now than at any time in the past. In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them. They still form with impeccable discipline and unreduced range in the silence of my thoughts—the view from inside is as rich as ever—but I can no longer convey them with ease. Vowel sounds and sibilant consonants slide out of my mouth, shapeless and inchoate even to my close collaborator. The vocal muscle, for sixty years my reliable alter ego, is failing. Communication, performance, assertion: these are now my weakest assets. Translating being into thought, thought into words, and words into communication will soon be beyond me and I shall be confined to the rhetorical landscape of my interior reflections.

Though I am now more sympathetic to those constrained to silence I remain contemptuous of garbled language. No longer free to exercise it myself, I appreciate more than ever how vital communication is to the republic: not just the means by which we live together but part of what living together means. The wealth of words in which I was raised were a public space in their own right—and properly preserved public spaces are what we so lack today. If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have.

There was a good, long profile on Judt by Wesley Yang  in New York Magazine earlier this year. Check it out.

[Photo Credit: Steve Pyke for the Chronicle Review]

Cool like a cucumber, that’s how we roll in the summertime.

There’s all sorts of ways to flip cucumbers (here’s a recipe for the salad picture above). When I used to wait tables the Amigos in the kitchen would slice cucumbers and sprinkle salt and chili powder on them, followed by a squeeze of lemon. It’d be a macho thing to see how much chili powder you could stand.

I usually have ’em plain with some kosher salt.

BJ Upton and Evan Longoria screamed at each other yesterday in the Ray’s dugout. The Rays are a frustrated team at the moment. Jonah Keri, who is writing a book on the organization, offers 10 Things the Rays should do to compete for the Whirled Serious.

All-City.

[Picture by Bags]